vanished off the coast of Patagonia, that there were stranger things on earth than an impenetrable wall. "You've seen the Roman catacombs? Marveled at them, that men can burrow into the earth like that? Then faintly, though very faintly, you understand how I felt standing there, with Nedra pressed close against me, shuddering--the glistening magnesium walls and avenues of subterranean Emporia extending in all directions from the shaft that pierced the city's roof, the lone communication with the surface of the earth. "The shaft rose from a sort of plaza, a wide space, rectangular, with avenues dug through the living stone and lined with metal, top and bottom as well as both sides, and with the various compartments that would correspond to our buildings honeycombed out from each avenue, so that there really was no feeling of a city as we know it--only of immense tunnels, intersecting, none of the relief of roofs and chimney pots and varying architectural façades--a triumph of cubism, a nightmare of magnesium that reflected a pale green light from opalescent tubing recessed everywhere into the city's roof. And through these vast avenues the masses of the Degraded swarmed in aimless and quite effortless contentment. "Literally," said O'Hara, "tens of thousands. The avenues were choked. It was worse than Trafalgar Square on a holiday, worse than the crush of devotees at the Grand National. Continuously they pressed through swinging doors into the food and slumber chambers of Emporia--vast rooms without the variance of so much as a welded seam, where, in great cauldronlike contrivances, the substance that was manufactured by the sun's rays in the photosynthetrons was constantly available, different foods, colored differently, tasting differently, all piped in from the reservoirs into which the photosynthetrons were drained--all automatic, not a hand raised to achieve the feeding of the populace except that which would guide the ladle to the mouth. The populace was fed--not quite like pigs, but with as little ceremony or appreciation. "The slumber rooms were uniform. Around the walls were tiers of bunks, each six feet wide and eight feet long, each cushioned with a yielding dry material much like foam rubber but incredibly enduring. It was impossible to tear it, impossible to wear it out from the small friction it received. As a matter of record, it had been in those bunks, unchanged, for nearly two centuries. "Sanitation? That was one of the major purposes of the Deluge, as they called it--a purging of the city, ridding it of both surplus population and uncleanliness, an alkaline solution that--but wait, I've got ahead of how I learned these things.